Patricia Peterson, Innovative Fashion Editor at The Times, Dies at 99

Patricia Peterson, the fashion editor of The New York Times during a distant era when hemlines made headlines and women in pantsuits were considered controversial — trends she tracked with enthusiasm and humor — died on June 15 at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 99.

Her daughter, Annika Peterson, confirmed the death.

Ms. Peterson joined The Times in 1956, when so-called women’s news appeared under the heading “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings,” and the all-female department covering it was tucked away on the ninth floor of the paper’s headquarters on West 43rd Street, far from the main newsroom, on the third floor.

But she was in distinguished company. Her colleagues included Gloria Emerson, who would go on to cover the Vietnam War; Phyllis Lee Levin, who wrote biographies of the first ladies Abigail Adams and Edith Wilson; and Nan Robertson, who became a Washington correspondent and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Male reporters and editors rarely ventured upstairs. “It was as if we kept the measles up on the ninth floor,” Ms. Levin was quoted as saying in a Times article in 2018.

But the women knew that they were documenting a changing culture, and that those changes were often expressed in fashion.

“That was what was so exciting about fashion,” Ms. Peterson said in 1989 for an oral history of the paper. “It wasn’t just Seventh Avenue or Paris, it was life around us.”